When most people think about ‘atheism’, concepts like ‘good’ or ‘charity’ aren’t forefront in their minds.
At the same time, organised religion has a historical monopoly on ‘good’ and continues to be proud of its ‘do-gooding’, in preach and practice, despite the strong likelihood that it has done far more harm than good in it’s long, yarn-spinning history.
We find this sad. Not only because organised religion survives, scandal after scandal, unscathed, but because the atheists we know are amongst the kindest, most caring people we’ve met, each capable of being moral and good without god stories to show them how.
We want to challenge the lowest-common-denominator view of atheism, to demonstrate that you don’t need god to be good. And we'll do this by donating 10% of any money we make to secular charities - in particular, those cleaning up the mess made by religion.
Some of you will have more experience than us in dealing with charities - so we’re grateful for any help nominating worthy causes to support. We’ll post here about the projects we like and you can tell us what you think.
But our first thoughts are to support Medecins Sans Frontieres and the fight to eliminate female genital mutilation - a particularly disgusting practice, oft enshrined in religious tradition and seeking to deprive young women of the capacity to enjoy sex… a horribly beastly thing, by any measure.
We'll post more about how we plan to support these causes as time goes on. But first we've got to make some money selling shoes!
In the mean time, if there are other projects you think we should know about, please get in touch at david@atheistberlin.com.
